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Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Documentary Online Response #5: Participatory Mode

Our entire class found Nobody’s Business to be a delightful
change of pace when we viewed it for participatory mode, largely because the
filmmaker, Alan Berliner’s, relationship with his father becomes the center,
catalyst, and purpose of the film. The complexity of this relationship shows
through in the first sequence of the film and develops ever more nuance and
weight as the film progresses.

Berliner manages to express this relationship with very
minimal voiceover narration. It is
almost entirely expressed in the diegetic dialogue between himself and his
father on-camera, with the help of non-diegetic post-modern use of archival
footage (largely of boxing matches) to render external and visual the struggles
that the filmmaker wanted us to understand were occurring more internally,
creating strong visual metaphors.

The way in which Alan Berliner allows his father to
constantly condemn and redeem himself in the course of the film’s interview
dialogue shows a great amount of charity and investment in the relationship.It would have been incredibly easy to edit
the same conversations to make his dad seem irredeemable, but that never
happens.Oscar Berliner is always
allowed to finish his thoughts, so that his outlandish initial sound bite
statements are softened by explanation and context, and sometimes even by the
arguments they provoke.Certainly the
sequences explaining and illustrating the intense loneliness of his father’s
lifestyle evoked a sense of explanation and forgiveness for some of the more unfeeling
words his father threw at him.

Certainly Berliner came across as more of an essayist than a
historian.He also embodied Nichol’s
statement that, “It is the filmmaker’s participatory engagement with unfolding
events that holds our attention.”[1]As Alan Berliner’s participation, catalysis,
and provocation were the glue and the impetus that kept the entire film
cohesive and kept me as a viewer engaged.Berliner’s own sense of family, identity, and relationships became the
normalized perspective against which to judge his father’s alternate value
set.The film felt inevitably structured
to evoke sympathy with Alan Berliner’s perspective and values, but also to
provoke a complicated, redeemed affection for Oscar Berliner who so frequently
antagonizes him.

It seems that without the voice of Alan Berliner, and the
sense of him navigating his relationship with his father, it would have been
difficult or impossible to portray his father with the same dignity and
likeability.The obvious affection that
Berliner has for his father is what allows the audience to repeatedly forgive
Oscar for his belligerence and folly.